


Down To The XYZ Of It

by wintergrey



Series: The Blood-Dimmed Tide [7]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: First Love, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 19:15:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1719581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/pseuds/wintergrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The games are pretty good, even if it’s just a city league, but Steve isn’t watching the game. He’s watching Bucky and the way Bucky’s tongue chases a creamy trickle of melting ice cream down the side of a cone while Bucky’s eyes are locked on Steve like he doesn’t have ice cream on his mind at all."</p><p> <i>Brooklyn, Fall of 1941</i></p><p> Song title from <a href="http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/1940s-top-songs/teach-me-tonight(anne-shelton).htm">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down To The XYZ Of It

**Author's Note:**

> ** Life Lessons:**   
>  [Start With The ABC Of It](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1706531)   
>  [Down to the XYZ Of It](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1719581)   
>  [Teach Me Tonight](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3897277/)
> 
> * * *

_Brooklyn, Fall of 1941_

If there’s one thing Steve is sure Bucky has, it’s more experience than him. Experience at most of life. In this case, experience with things like kissing (and more), but now Steve’s starting to wonder if something’s wrong. That’s not to say Bucky isn’t good at it. He is. He’s amazing, even if Steve has no one to compare it to in order to say for sure.

Steve just really wishes Bucky would do it more often. More often, more everything. He does love the way Bucky looks at him that’s almost shy when Bucky’s waiting on Steve to make the first move. That’s something he never expected to see. He never expected Bucky to act like Steve kissing him was some kind of special thing he couldn’t just take for granted—something he had to wait for Steve to bestow on him like a gift.

It actually makes Steve pretty hot and bothered when he thinks about the way Bucky looks at him through lowered lashes, the way Bucky runs his tongue over his lower lip and then bites it as though he doesn’t know he’s doing it. That makes Steve want to kiss him so badly, makes him feel a kind of aggressive rush in his chest that he’s never felt about anything or anyone else. Being a little guy, he expects himself—he’s sure everyone else does too—to be shy or tentative about this stuff but when he looks at Bucky he knows exactly what he wants and he wants it all the damn time.

Bucky’s doing that thing right now, in the middle of blistering fall day that might as well be summer again for the trickle of sweat down Steve’s spine and the dampness at his hairline. They’re on the bleachers at the park watching guys from the garment district play baseball against guys from the docks. The games are pretty good, even if it’s just a city league, but Steve isn’t watching the game. He’s watching Bucky and the way Bucky’s tongue chases a creamy trickle of melting ice cream down the side of a cone while Bucky’s eyes are locked on Steve like he doesn’t have ice cream on his mind at all.

Steve would be mad at him—because he’s pretty damn uncomfortable and this isn’t the place to be having the kinds of feelings he’s having—except that he doesn’t think Bucky even knows he’s doing it. He licks a trickle of ice cream off of his thumb without thinking about it and sees a flicker in Bucky’s eyes as Bucky follows the movement. So, at least it’s not just him.

It’s really inconvenient, especially when Bucky seems to have lost his usual good-time-guy attitude about grabbing a tumble in a back room or the back seat of a car and is instead trying to be respectable or respectful or something else Steve doesn’t understand. He’s not sure what to say or do about it. Maybe it’s different between guys and nobody told him. That wouldn’t surprise Steve a bit, nobody tells him much of anything—especially about sex.

The ball cracks against the bat and everyone leans back and looks up at once to watch it arc—white dot in perfect blue sky—over the bleachers. Shouting and scuffling below are familiar sounds; Steve remembers being a little kid under the bleachers with Bucky, kicking through the gravel and trash for coins dropped from men’s trouser pockets. They usually scrounged enough for a soda to share between them.

Once in a while you’d find a watch or wallet and someone would give you a little something for bringing it back. More often than not you’d find ends of cigarettes and used rubbers, always a source of speculation about what went on down there. Steve had his first cigarette under there, with Bucky, and it nearly did him in. He can still taste the tobacco, feel the clench of his lungs closing.

“You gonna eat that?” Bucky’s done with his ice cream—Steve always takes too long for exactly this reason, dreaming and not eating—and leans over to take what’s left of Steve’s, liquid sweetness and the last of the cone as it’s losing its crunch.

“No, I’m done.” Truth is, Steve wants to watch Bucky eat it, the curl of his tongue through the melted ice cream in the reservoir of the cone before he slides the whole thing into his mouth. Hell. He has to wait hours, until tonight, to be alone with Bucky.

There are, of course, always books to teach Steve what he needs to know. There aren’t necessarily books on exactly what he wants—not that he’d be seen with them in public if there were—but he’s a smart guy. And that’s how he knows at least the basics, or the possibilities, of what he wants. It briefly occurs to him that maybe nobody told Bucky but, the way Bucky is acting, Steve isn’t sure it’s a lack of knowledge. It’s something else. Whatever it is, he has to find out what it is and soon, before Bucky kills him.

There’s only so much time to find out, though. They don’t have a lot of time alone together. Steve sweeps floors in a factory that makes uniform shirts. He overhears the managers talking about how they’re getting a military contract and the changes they need to make. Bucky makes deliveries for the butcher and the green grocer in the mornings, works afternoons washing cars and trucks. After that, they have their parents to help out, friends to hang with, and Bucky can’t exactly quit taking girls out or people will think he’s going steady with someone.

Steve doesn’t care about that last part. Tonight, like every other Saturday night, he draws from memory the places they’ve been and the things they’ve done. Bucky comes by after his date, meets Steve on the corner downstairs from Steve’s place, and they walk over to Bucky’s together like it never happened. They talk about baseball, about the war, they listen to the radio with Bucky’s dad while they eat leftovers at the tiny table in Bucky’s kitchen until the ten o’clock news hour is done.

Now it’s officially night. These are the times they get to be together, when Bucky’s folks are out or in bed. Then, it’s up to Steve to make the first move.

They don’t talk. As soon as they’re alone, as soon as Bucky’s mom calls, “Goodnight, boys!”, the conversation stops and they’re there, quiet and awkward in a way that never came between them before. But it’s not so much a barrier as it is a river to be crossed. Steve wades in with his hand on Bucky’s chest above the top button of his pajama shirt.

Bucky meets him halfway once he’s moving, hand on the clipped-short hair at the nape of Steve’s neck to draw him in. Kissing is like finding land, land so familiar they can walk it in the dark behind their closed eyes. Bucky pulls Steve into his lap, straddling his hips, and traces the fingers of his other hand up the line of Steve’s spine so that he shivers with the touch.

“Are you cold?” Bucky worries about him more these days. He’s grabbing a blanket off the foot of his bed before Steve can answer.

“It’s not—” Steve gives up on the truth because it’s so damn good to feel Bucky shake that blanket out and wrap it around his shoulders. He yields to the caretaking and Bucky draws him in to kiss him again.

“I can close the window,” Bucky offers but Steve shakes his head. It’s gone almost frosty since the sun went down but his cheeks feel as hot as they did at noon.

“I’m okay.” He kisses Bucky back, curling his tongue against Bucky’s to taste familiar tooth powder and the unmistakable taste of Bucky’s mouth. The touch of his tongue makes Bucky moan and pull him closer. Every little sound is a danger and a victory at once.

Steve finds the buttons of Bucky’s shirt in the dark, undoes them one at a time. Bucky has silky dark hair down the centre of his chest that Steve loves to touch, loves to follow wisps of it out toward his nipples. Some time over this summer, Bucky stopped looking anything like a boy and turned into a man. It’s fascinating and beautiful and Steve wants to ask if he can draw Bucky naked just to immortalize it. He would even ask if he weren’t allowed to feel it under his hands for himself down to catching each small nipple between each thumb and forefinger to tease another noise out of Bucky’s throat.

Steve’s not sure that change is ever going to happen for him but Bucky doesn’t seem to care. His mouth drags over Steve’s jaw and down in a hot streak that startles Steve into biting his own lower lip to keep quiet. The next kiss stings as though there’s going to be a mark over the pulse in Steve’s throat in the morning and that’s so stupid of them both but Steve can’t speak to tell Bucky to stop. Bucky’s hands—so much bigger than Steve’s and so strong—grab Steve’s ass hard and Steve rocks his hips instinctively, pushing into his grip. The movements make his hard dick brush against the front of his pajama pants, on the second pass he can feel dampness on the fabric.

That aggressive rush hits Steve again, a fierce need that scrambles his reasoning so bad it scares him. He pushes Bucky back against the wall, hands on his chest, and kisses him hard on the mouth. At least he stopped Bucky from leaving marks on him this way. Bucky’s muscles ripple and surge under his hands, Steve traces them down to the ridge of Bucky’s hipbones, runs his thumbs into the little hollows that show above Bucky’s waistband when he stretches.

Like this, he can feel the way the fabric of Bucky’s pajama pants is stretched as taut as his over Bucky’s erection. He wants to touch so badly that he whimpers into Bucky’s next kiss. He knows he can make Bucky feel good—there’s so much they could be doing right now. Not kissing Bucky is physically painful but he has to ask.

“Do you want to stop?” Steve isn’t going to move his hands until Bucky tells him to but already his mind is swirling with how it’s going to feel to actually touch through that thin fabric, then to undo the button of Bucky’s pants and feel that hot, taut flesh against his fingertips. Just thinking about it makes Steve’s balls tighten and his dick, impossibly, gets harder. That cool, wet patch spreads slowly on the front of his pajama pants.

“No.” Bucky sounds strangled. “I don’t want to stop. But… is this right?” In the very little light in the room, Steve can just see the dark wells of his eyes, the swollen glisten of his kissed mouth.

No. It’s not. It’s not right, not if they listen to everyone else. Steve could take a poll and almost everyone on the block would say they were going to hell. But it’s not hurting anyone and that’s all that matters. Steve keeps telling himself that’s all that matters. He loves Bucky and Bucky loves him—Steve knows they wouldn’t do this if Bucky didn’t—and they’re not hurting anyone.

“It’s right for us,” he says at last. That’ll have to do.

“I want—” Bucky shakes his head but his fingertips brush the front of Steve’s pants where his aching erection hasn’t subsided at all. “I know we shouldn’t, but I want to.” His voice is raw, cracking on the word ‘want’ as though it hurts to say.

“You do it with girls.” Steve sits back on Bucky’s thighs and the blanket slides away, leaving him chilled. Saying that truth out loud makes the back of his throat ache.

“They’re not you.” Bucky shakes his head, then focuses on Steve again. “They’re not… just not you. You’re what I want.” He fists one hand in the front of Steve’s shirt and pulls him in for another kiss, curls his other hand around Steve’s dick through his thin pants. The shock of that touch, so direct and so intimate, leaves Steve grabbing at Bucky’s shoulders for balance even as he’s jerking, pushing against Bucky’s palm.

“Bucky, please,” he moans, even as Bucky’s saying,

“I can’t.” It’s not quite cold water but it freezes Steve anyway. “I can’t, I can’t do that to you,” Bucky mutters, pulling his hands away and covering his face with them.

It takes every ounce of Steve’s decency not to shake him and shout, “Yes, you can,” so loud it wakes up the whole building.

“Okay,” he says, instead, because that’s the only right thing to say and Steve never wants to do anything but the right thing for Bucky—for them. “It’s okay. Do you want me to go to my own bed?” It’s just moving down to the trundle bed that slides under Bucky’s when Steve isn’t there. “Or do you want me to leave?”

“I never want you to leave,” Bucky mutters from behind his hands. “That’s what’s wrong.”

“I’ll just be here, then.” Steve slips away to sprawl in his own bed next to Bucky’s. He drags the discarded blanket over himself, too flustered to get under the covers. He’s still so hard, he needs to touch Bucky so badly, and he can’t. He’d never thought being so close could feel so far away.

“You can. You know,” Bucky says dully as he flops over in his bed. He’s so close, his voice is almost in Steve’s ear. It’s not as though they haven’t done that before, without ever acknowledging it. Steve’s almost too embarrassed to do it but the ache and need is too much. He pushes his pants aside under the blanket to touch himself.

Now being quiet isn’t just about not waking Bucky’s parents. He bites his lip, tries not to writhe remembering how it felt to have Bucky’s hand on him. The pressure to come rises again and he’s so close when he hears Bucky’s moan cut through the pounding of his pulse in his ears. Instinctively, he reaches out as if he’s going to comfort and his hand touches Bucky’s reaching back for him.

Bucky’s hand is hot and strong, his fingers tangle with Steve’s and tighten painfully as he moans again. Now Steve can hear the shift of fabric and rock of his body as Bucky jerks off. Knowing that’s happening is too much. Steve swallows down the howl that wants to get out of him as he comes into the folds of the blanket in long spurts. Above him, Bucky grinds his name out from between clenched teeth, shaking.

After, they don’t let go of each other’s hand.

“I can’t do the right thing,” Bucky whispers into the dark. Steve thought he’d fallen asleep. Do the right thing? Get married? Of course they can’t.

“I know,” he whispers back. “I don’t expect—”

“I would.” Bucky sounds like he’s going to cry and it hurts Steve’s chest worse than not being able to breathe.

“You don’t have to do the right thing for me,” Steve says, squeezing Bucky’s hand gently.

“I would,” Bucky says again.


End file.
